Thinking: The Sim to Adventurer Ratio

So, I think about weird things while I’m walking — admittedly, this is one of the reasons I enjoy walking as much as I do. While I was out walking to the bank and the grocery store, I thought about The Sims, and I thought about adventurers. It started out as an idea of how to bridge the Sims concept of neighborhoods to the Catan concept of settlements.

I think I just about figured it out.

Now, I’ve played The Sims 2 on two levels, primarily — the “solo run” which involves just one character in a house, which is easily distinguishable as “broken,” because the needs of a single Sim are so ridiculously easy to manage, there’s little to no difficulty unless you don’t understand the game’s basic management structure — and then there’s the “pop out babies as fast as possible” family.

The second household had a single mother and father (the latter of whom had gone to college and picked up his extra Wants), and after I ran through one “generation” of kids, I decided I wanted a challenge. I wanted to see how difficult it was to squeeze out children as quickly as possible to keep the household at maximum capacity.

It seemed to me that while there still weren’t any glaring difficulties in managing a family of eight, even with several infants and toddlers, and both parents working full time, affording nannies and juggling homework, plus teaching words and walking and potty training weren’t an insurmountable task. Which was probably the intent. You know, time-consuming, not difficult. There’s a lot of gameplay to be had there.

Many intersecting lives made things more interesting, though. Wants went unfulfilled, and Lifetime Aspirations climbed more slowly. Skills were more difficult to max out, but I sent over a dozen children to college before I started to get tired of the game, and switched back and forth between the kids who were “all grown up,” and the ones who were still struggling through diapers and high school.

But things still got done, which made me think that one family in The Sims (specifically, The Sims 2) equated one adventurer. Lots of things to juggle, not everything getting done. Some wants go unfulfilled, some quests uncompleted. An entire neighborhood can’t represent more than about one settlement in The Settlers of Catan.

So there you have it:
One family of 4-5 Sims to one Dungeons & Dragons adventurer.
One neighborhood in The Sims 2 to one settlement in Catan.
One location in Arkham Horror to one settlement in Catan.